so i stayed up until 2am last night finishing this game! it's very good imo. not many complaints.

i think if there's like a genuine lesson to be learned wrt antifascism etc, it would be that you gotta have Dedication, Conviction. edward and the other pirates have very little in the front portion of the game, and really only edward and hornigold develop any at some point. blackbeard is obviously a man of vision, but ends up being killed because of his own dramatic penchant. vane and rackham are little better than drunkards. Kidd, as an Assassin, does have some, and manages to impart just a touch to edward before their death. but by and large, the pirates ain't got it, and their project of sovereignty fails miserably.

one complaint about i do have is that the multi-year timeskips feel like any other time transition in the game--there's no real sense of the scale of the timeline, which takes place from 1715 to 1722 or so. that's a long time! but there's no animations or splash screens or anything between those sequences to really make it sink in. very easy to lose track of.

i made an effort this playthrough to clear every location i visited, and did a good job of that, but the main storyline and the sidequests i did do only take you to like 80% of the locations on the map, which is HUGE. the environments are lush as well.

the modern-day storyline is also good, especially if you're willing to wander around abstergo entertainment looking for computers to hack. there's... a lot of stuff about Desmond, who as you may recall gave his own life to preserve the world at the end of AC3. voice memos he recorded for his dad. photos he took on his phone. tugged on the heartstrings a bit, i'll admit. it's also incredibly funny how willing this team (ubisoft bucharest, i think) was to put ubisoft montreal on blast. abstergo entertainment is in montreal, and the internal communications you recover are not fucking subtle about how shitty these corporations are--much like the secret materials back during the Ezio games. at least one of these writers knows what's up.

the Observatory is an interesting goal for the Templars to have, this "absolute surveillance" (as long as one has a blood sample). obviously...this is very bad! huge invasion of privacy on a massive scale, and basically assuring the templars' fascist control of vast swathes of public and private life. but like, technofascist style. plus that area of the game is SO cool.

i think that's most of what i've got to say about it. right now i'm really leaning towards skipping rogue, which fills in details between edward's time and connors, and playing Unity, which i've never played!! that's right, we've now passed the point where i'm replaying and moving into fresh territory, for me at least. Unity is like ten years old or something now.

anyway hashtags #AssassinsCreed #AssassinsCreed4